Commentary |
on Inside the Critics’ Circle by Phillipa K. Chong
“Many interviewees said they weren’t sure they ‘counted’ as a critic because they don’t self-identify as one. They often write less out of a sense of journalistic public service and more to reinforce their professional standing elsewhere.”
Poetry |
Selections from études
Essay |
“Russian Lines and American Lines: Traveling America with Sergey Gandlevsky”
“The name Gandlevsky comes from the Ukrainian word meaning revenue or earnings. They must have been peddlers of some sort. ‘Do you know what this means?’ he explained. ‘I was born to be a charlatan!'”
Commentary |
Singing the Unsun: on Andrew Zawacki’s Unsun: f/11
“Even as old gestures of the pastoral must be reprised and revised, what is possible, if nothing else, is a singing of the undone.”
Commentary |
on This Woman’s Work by Julie Delporte and How I Tried To Be A Good Person by Ulli Lust
“How do you draw the feeling of being unable to draw? The question is a driving force behind these graphic memoirs that reckon with disruption — jobs, needy men, motherhood”
Commentary |
on The Heart Is A Full-Wild Beast, stories by John L’Heureux
“Since the actions of faith tend to produce faith, L’Heureux insists, we must be careful where we bestow them.”
Commentary |
on A Theory of Birds, poems by Zaina Alsous
“The story of exile is fundamentally an erotic story, about loss and longing — and therefore, the poetics of unattainability is seductive for outsiders but useless for the people living in it.”
Commentary |
on Essays: One by Lydia Davis
“Davis’ writing on writing possesses a candor and warmth that are rare in the genre, even while she demands an unusual amount of rigor.”
Fiction |
“Siesta in the Cedar Tree”
“When Cecilia left at five that afternoon, walking alone through the woods, Elena ran to her mother’s room and said, ‘Cecilia has tuberculosis.’ Suddenly a fence sprang up around her …”
Commentary |
“Such Little Things We Are”: on Swift: New & Selected Poems by David Baker
“Swift reintroduces Baker’s older poems into our current environmental and political landscape while revealing how the lyric speaker can engage the natural world during moments of acute personal grief …”
Commentary |
“Who’d Want To Be A Man?”: on Eyes Bottle Dark With a Mouthful of Flowers by Jake Skeets & Father’s Day by Matthew Zapruder
“Zapruder is ruthless in his willingness to face down hard wrongs … and Skeets calls back into the fold of the present all who have been turned by its injustices and bigotry to ash.”
Commentary |
on The Boy in the Labyrinth, poems by Oliver de la Paz
“Lonely and crowded, loving and remote, The Boy in the Labyrinth is a paradoxical book—a collection of poems heavy and complicated with metaphor trying to understand two sons on the autism spectrum.”
Commentary |
on The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care by Anne Boyer
“Boyer refuses typical pink-ribbon euphemisms and instead offers a truer slogan: fuck white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’s ruinous carcinogenisphere.